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31 October 2017

There's an ugly war being fought over the American love for cats right now... and the cats are losing.

Yes, most of us love cats, are intrigued by cats, watch cat videos, and in ever-growing numbers share our homes with cats. But if you'd had your ear to the ground of the last few years, you'd realize there's a force out there trying to change that.

It began with a series of high-profile headlines about how cats are murderous beasts. It was sustained by junk science and "alternative facts" about how many birds outdoor cats kill each year. And it was given credibility by the academic credentials of the virulent cat-haters behind this propaganda war, one of whom actually said in his book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer that felines should be removed from the landscape "by any means necessary."

(Which to the best of my knowledge is the first and only time a cat hater has quoted Malcom X to support his case. But I digress.)

You might accuse me of over-reacting, and I hope I am. But these guys are playing a long game here, slowly getting the media to pay attention to their anti-cat message and, more frighteningly, attempting to supplant the reality of the cats in our laps with the demonic image of a killing machine with an unquenchable appetite for endangered songbird. They're presenting to veterinary organizations and at science conferences. They're writing articles and books, and doing propaganda-filled book tours. They're courting the media. They're supporting hyped up media coverage of the risks of toxoplasmosis and rabies.

And what are we in animal welfare doing about it?

Good question.

Sometimes it seems we're all so engrossed in our own cat-positive worlds, doing TNR and helping shelters increase their feline lifesaving and singing the praises of community cats, warehouse cats, and barn cats that we're almost oblivious to the propaganda taking hold all around us.

When we do pay attention, we seem to think that cats will be spared by the irony of the fact that, by opposing TNR, these idiots are themselves the greatest barrier to reducing the number of unowned, free-roaming cats.

We need to wake up. We need to write op-eds, write our own books, go on local radio programs, put our best and most articulate spokespeople forward, fund research, and stop burying our heads in the kitty litter. These guys are trying to eradicate cats from America unless they're safely locked in a high-security indoor environment -- which means they want to kill more than half the cats currently alive in this country.

And they're frustratingly, hypocritically doing it in the name of saving birds... birds who themselves have been responsible for more human and wildlife deaths than any other type of living creatures bigger than a pathogen.

17 July 2014

I thought I'd heard all the reasons people object to the idea of free pet adoptions -- but I was wrong.

After I wrote a post about the marketing power of free adoptions, and explained why I think charging adoption fees is an obstacle to our pet adoption mission, I started hearing from many, many rescue groups all over the U.S. that they can't possibly survive as an organization without revenue from adoption fees. Some have gone so far as to accuse larger shelters and foundations like Maddie's Fund of trying to "drive rescue groups out of business."

I'll be honest, I understand their feelings. A change in your revenue model can be a big paradigm change for a small nonprofit, especially one that doesn't have anyone on the team who is interested in marketing, fundraising, and development.

I think, however, that the benefits far outweigh the pain of change.

Let's step back and look at the big picture for a minute. Most nonprofits outside the rescue world don't have a fee-based revenue model. They raise money by cultivating relationships with individual and business supporters, with fundraising events, with retail operations such as thrift stores, and with development of grants, bequests, endowments, etc.

Of course, just thinking about that is exhausting for a small group made up of people who are mostly working in direct animal care rather than organizational work. In fact, we've created a culture where the less effort a nonprofit puts into anything other than direct services the more we praise them.

The problem is, that model is truly not sustainable. It leaves groups without a structure to rely on when market realities change.

For example, the adoption fee model might really go away as more groups realize the huge marketing benefit of fee-waived adoption promotions. Then you'll be competing with groups who adopt out pets for free or for "name your own fee" donations, and you'll be forced to change overnight instead of doing it strategically.

There are easy options to getting all or most of our revenue through adoption fees and tapping into the marketing power of fee-waived adoptions.

For example, what if you went to a local business, shopping center, nursery, big pet supply or farm store, and asked them to do a "We'll pay your adoption fees this weekend!" event in the parking lot? They get tons of customers flocking in, you get your adoptions paid for (plus donations if you play your cards right), the pets get the benefit of the marketing buzz, and everyone wins!

Additionally, you need to think outside the animal welfare bubble. I'm on the board of an animal organization that receives funding from a non-animal welfare foundation that supports charitable endeavors in our region. They give us money because we're local and meet their standards of sustainability, accountability, etc. As far as I know, we're the only animal organization they support at all!

This is why finding a volunteer with an interest in marketing and/or development is critically important for small rescue groups. You really can't survive long just caring for the animals and cramming in the bare minimum of organizational support and development while you have one hand on a kitten bottle and the other holding your eyelids open.

The whole point of finding people to help with this end of things is to free up each volunteer to focus on what she or he does best, whatever it is. After all, direct animal care is necessary! But so is organizational work such as marketing and development. Animal organizations need it all, or they won't be able to survive losing, say, their founder or core group of volunteers, or economic or market shifts.

I feel very strongly that rescue groups are mostly locked into an unsustainable model of helping animals, and I would really like to see us step back from how we are currently doing things and broaden our revenue streams and free ourselves to use the fee-waived adoption marketing model and any other innovations that come along when they're appropriate or helpful.

The animals need our best, not just in TLC, but in organizational professionalism.

30 May 2014

Update: It looks like the easy share feature is back. Whether it was a feature they abandoned or a glitch is unknown at this time, but definitely take the information I include below about the limited value of pages (not individuals, pages) sharing to another page to heart. This is not a good strategy for getting your message out.

I woke up this morning to a number of people contacting me wanting to know why they couldn't share a post from one Facebook page to another anymore.

This was news to me, but when I got online, I checked, and found it was true for pages that had been converted to the new format -- which is supposed to be fully implemented on all pages by June 5.

What does this mean for animal organizations?

On one hand, it's a good thing, as reach (the number of people who see your posts) is almost zero for shared page posts. It's a bad practice to share from one page to another if you want your followers to see the content you're sharing.

On the other hand, reach is not the only reason one page might share something to another. Often, it's a way to let the other page know what's going on. For instance, this weekend I'm doing social media for Maddie's Pet Adoption Days, and the particiapting organizations have been sharing their posts to the MPAD Facebook page so we'll be aware of their promotions and available pets.

Nonetheless, sharing from one page you manage to another with the idea that people will see those shared posts in their newsfeeds was not a good strategy to get your message out, and the end of this feature is going to prompt you to create original content for your pages, and thus, get greater reach.

For those of us who used the share feature for other purposes, it will be missed.

For however long it lasts, there's a couple of workarounds. First, the easiest:

At the top of the page you manage, switch so you're operating as yourself, not the page.

Click "share" on the post.

Select "Share on a page you manage" from the menu that starts out with "Share on your timeline.

Select the page you want to share it to.

If that stops working or for whatever reason doesn't work for you, try this:

And more importantly, understand that no one is visiting your Facebook page and seeing what you posted, so if your a post won't show up in people's newsfeeds, you would be better off not posting it at all.

08 February 2014

A couple of months ago, my friend (sister with different DNA, really) Gina Spadafori regained the right to use her PetConnection.com domain again. We discussed opening up the old Pet Connection archive there (my posts were all copied over to this blog, but the PC archive itself, including everyone else's posts, was inaccessible). And once we started down that road, we thought: Should we start blogging there again?

We decided HELL YES, and then we invited two of our favorite dog people on Planet Earth, Kim Campbell Thornton and Liz Palika, to come back, along with our beloved Dr. Tony Johnson.

All said yes, although Tony will only be an infrequent contributor. And we also made the vow: NO ads. NO sponsors. NO mealy mouthed BS. This is just all of us blogging about animal issues for no reason other than a desire to communicate.

So I hope those of you who missed Pet Connection will visit the blog once again, and those of you who missed its heyday will stop by and help us make a new one!

20 November 2013

A shelter or animal control agency that responsibly manages its intake flow is still an open admission shelter.

Whether you are for or against managed admission, or an apologist for a so-called shelter that proudly calls itself "open admission" as it marches pets from the admission desk to the kill room, or an avid no-kill advocate, it's still highly likely that you speak as if "open admission" and "managed admission" shelters are, by definition, two different things.

But that's not true. Shelters that fulfill the legal or contractual requirements of their municipality as to what animals they are required to admit, and that additionally have provisions for emergency intake for animals in immediate need, are open admission shelters.

That doesn't change if they work with pet owners to delay intake until the shelter has room, the animal has had vaccinations, or a foster home opens up. Nor does it change if they instead work with the pet owner to try to help them keep the pet, or to find a home for the pet themselves.

Evidence is mounting that the long list of policies and programs we term "managed" open admission save lives, help pet owners in need, get pets needed veterinary and basic care, and do so without increasing pet abandonment nor diverting intake to other facilities.

That's why those of us who support this sea change in animal sheltering should stop letting advocates of outdated sheltering practices choose the terms that describe it.

Managed open admission works. Unmanaged open admission is irresponsible and inhumane. They are both open admission.

10 October 2013

I'm at the Best Friends Animal Society No More Homeless Pets Conference in Jacksonville right now. In the elevator this morning, I overheard a person wearing a t-shirt supporting spay/neuter efforts tell her companion that two unaltered cats and their descendants will produce... wait for it... 10 million kittens in 12 years.

I interrupted her and told her that yesterday, at the day-long Face to Face with Feral Freedom session, Dr. Julie Levy of the University of Florida shelter medicine program -- who knows as much about community cats as anyone alive, and has done more research on them than anyone, too -- said that no one knows the actual number of community cats in the United States, but the number lies somewhere between 10-90 million.

So those two unaltered cats were pretty busy 12 years ago.

I'm going to reiterate a point I've made before, but this time in even simpler terms: We don't make neuter-return programs more attractive to government agencies, politicians, and community members by wildly inflating the reproductive capacity of cats.

Doing so only creates the impression that cats are a pest species that breeds like flies.

If it were true, not only would cats be the only species on earth, but we'd also have a very hard time convincing anyone to support TNR or any kind of humane, non-lethal efforts to control the population of community cats, because they would think of cats as pests, not companion animals or appealing wild animals.

You may think you're bolstering the need for TNR, but you're making it more difficult to get support for TNR.

The real numbers are somewhere between 50 and 1000 descendants from two unaltered cats. (Source)

07 August 2013

Have shelter reform and no-kill advocacy groups lost their way on Facebook?

I don't normally think of no-kill leader Nathan Winograd as a social media critic, but in a blog post yesterday, he called out a lot of no-kill groups on Facebook for pandering for "likes" and "shares" instead of focusing on their mission:

I see a trend on the Facebook pages of some No Kill educational
organizations which show them moving away from substance just at the
time it is needed most. Instead of substantive posts, they are posting
photos, videos, and stories of animals designed not to empower, but to
amuse as these tend to get large numbers of “likes.” Non-shelter No Kill
Facebook pages, if they are to authentically serve the cause they claim
to support, should be primarily educational tools, posting material
intended to elevate the discussion about shelter killing in the U.S.
beyond clichés about pet overpopulation and the importance of spay/neuter.
They need to be followed by a dialogue on those posts to answer
questions, clarify confusion, respond to comments, and to provide
assistance to activists as needed.

This requires effort, and it can often lead to friction, but, in the end, it is a necessary precursor to change.

This loss of focus isn't a problem unique to no-kill and shelter reform Facebook pages. The animal welfare movement in general suffers from hopeless message drift, as you can see from ten minutes looking at the long list of rules, requirements, restrictions, and regulations appended to half the adoption listings on Petfinder -- so much so that it's sometimes hard to find the only thing that should be there -- the pet's personal story.

It's in their press releases and story pitches, too, where instead of presenting a single compelling piece of information they layer it with redundant quotes from their president and a quick plug for their upcoming adoption fair and don't forget to spay and neuter your pets and don't breed and buy while shelter dogs die... it's exhausting just reading their signature files!

So it's no wonder this leaked over to their Facebook pages. But when it did, it got amplified in a very disturbing way by two forces.

One, of course, is Facebook itself, which requires you to dance like a music box ballerina whenever they start the music. If most of what's on your page isn't content that drives tons of likes, comments, and shares, Facebook will essentially punish you by showing fewer and fewer of your posts to your own followers by wielding its super-sekrit EdgeRank algorithm.

Since photo posts and cute memes and pandering for engagement ("Like if you love puppies, share if you love kittens, comment if you love both!" "Can you name a dog breed without the letter "E" in it?") result in lots of the elusive likes, shares, and comments, pages advocating for a cause become addicted to the easy boost in EdgeRank and thus, number of fans who view a page.

Then you post something serious about an upcoming meeting at city hall about changes to the holding period at your local animal control, and not only does no one engage with it, but hardly anyone sees it. Talk about negative reinforcement.

But it's not all Facebook's fault. We're guilty, too, of wanting to be liked, wanting to be popular, wanting to have the biggest fan count, wanting to see the comment count tick into double and then triple digits on every post.

Even without the EdgeRank sword hanging over our heads, it's likely a lot of us would still be sweating and shaking with eagerness to be the first one of our network to share today's super-viral Grumpy Cat meme.

I have two things to say: First, we're not here to be liked. We're here to end the use of lethal animal control practices and reform how we shelter animals.

Second, you can actually serve Facebook's algorithmic delusions of grandeur, keep your EdgeRank high so your followers will see what you post, and stay focused on your mission, all at the same time. This is how:

Use Facebook Insights -- their free, built-in analytics program -- to determine what times of day and what days of the week your posts do best. Learn more here.

Use Facebook's scheduler -- also built-in and free -- to schedule your posts for those times, leaving at least a couple of hours, if not 3, between posts. (Too-frequent posting is a guaranteed ticket to Facebook limbo. Watch your post views and see!) Learn more here.

Use relevant photos and memes. You can actually spread your message just fine with memes and photos, and reap the benefit of all that EdgeRank juicy goodness. Just make sure your viral content is related to your mission, not random images of teh coot kittehs there for no purpose whatsoever other than to pander for engagement.

Engage! When page admins, in the name of the page or in their own names, respond to comments, solicit responses, and in general behave... dare I say it? ... socially, engagement on a post will go higher, and thus, more of your followers will see it.

Ask for help! Posts in which a "share" is requested will get more shares than those without a request. I don't mean manipulative share-whoring like this, or this; I mean authentically having a reason for wanting your followers to share your content, telling them what it is, and then asking them to do it. You'll be amazed.

Be interesting. People with something interesting to say, particularly those who say it well, will always have a following. Be that person.

Be sticky. Learn from what communications professionals, advertisers, psychology researchers, and scientists have figured out about what makes messages "sticky" -- in other words, what makes people notice what you're saying, remember it, and act on it.

Stay on message. Why does your organization exist? Nearly all your posts should be mission-focused, with the additional challenge that you need to find compelling and "sticky" ways of conveying that mission. And of course it's fine to post something silly on Fridays or whenever you sense things need a change of tone, but even the silly, fun, heartwarming things you post can be relevant to your mission. There are thousands of memes out there about pet adoption or the human-animal bond. You can do better than just another adorbs puppy with a tilted head.

Note that this advice is for reform and advocacy groups. If your page is about pet adoption or building community support for your foster, volunteer, and fundraising efforts, you'll want to use a different set of tactics, and yes, "cute" will play a much larger role.

But if you're here to change the world for the millions of pets who are needlessly killed every year, you can and must use the tools at your disposal, including Facebook, effectively and strategically, not randomly and reactively.

04 April 2013

This is the third in a series of posts examining the comments made by No-Kill opponents in public discussions of the movement to save all healthy and treatable pets in our nation's shelters.

There's a new "talking point" popping up with orchestrated frequency wherever people gather to discuss the No-Kill Movement online. I call it "WILL NO ONE THINK
OF THE STRAYS?!?!??" (All-caps and multiple exclamation points and
question marks are required to really express the hysteria that
underlies this particular talking point.)

Because it's new, a lot of No-Kill advocates aren't quite sure what to make of it -- which is exactly why they thought if up in the first place. It's certainly not because it's true.

To
save all healthy and treatable homeless dogs and cats in our nation requires we find homes for around 2.5 million additional pets out of the pool of approximately 27 million households that get a new dog or cat each year.

This simple piece of math puts a huge crimp in the habitual contention of No-Kill opponents that there are "too many pets, not enough homes" and therefore slaughtering homeless pets in shelters is unavoidable.

The other problem with their old math is that communities all over the U.S. are routinely and sustainably saving more than 90 percent of their homeless pets without divine intervention, billions of dollars, or the laws of nature being turned on their heads.

All of which has left No-Kill opponents in search of something, anything, to change the math. So they came up with strays. I'm sorry; I mean, "STRAYS!!!!!"

What they're contending is that no matter how well shelters perform in saving the lives of the pets who come in their doors, it won't matter nor spell success because there are uncountable quadrazillions of stray dogs and cats all over the country, and if we add them into the equation, there really are "too many pets, not enough homes," just like they always told us back in the days before we learned to count.

The beauty of using this "gotcha" point to argue against no-kill is that it's a sensationalistic, vague, unquantified concept. Advocates of shelter reform could point to success in reducing intake and increasing lifesaving until literally every community in the country was saving more than 90 percent of the pets who enter its shelter system, and No-Kill opponents could still go, "It's all a lie because STRAYS!"

Are they right? No.

First, by their own admission and the best estimates of both feral cat advocates and enemies, the vast majority of unowned, unsheltered pets in this country are feral cats.

Feral cats are not "strays" and they're not "homeless." They are no more or less a matter for shelters to deal with than racoons are, and that is a simple fact we have to grasp if we're ever going to have a reasonable conversation about a humane approach to free-living, unowned cats in our communities.

Second, while there are a few areas with a "feral dog" problem, that's all there are: a few. I live in the Detroit metro area, where there are an estimated 20-50,000 free-roaming dogs on the streets. This is widely acknowledged to be the greatest density of such dogs in the United States. Detroit Dog Rescue fonder Dan "Hush" Carlisle estimates that 80-90
percent of them are recently abandoned pet dogs rather than feral dogs.

Nor are all these dogs homeless; many are currently owned dogs being allowed to run loose by their owners. That's also true in rural areas where dogs run loose. They are also not homeless.

Yes, there are pockets of truly feral dogs in junkyards, remote areas, and abandoned urban neighborhoods, usually running in mixed packs with free-roaming owned dogs. And while no one knows the exact number of truly homeless, free-living, feral dogs in the United States, no credible source contends the number is so large that it significantly alters the bigger picture of canine homelessness and sheltering.

Which is to say, it can be addressed by the No-Kill Equation, ie, targeted spay/neuter, rehabilitation, sanctuary, and adoption when the dog can be safely housed, or killing for the safety of society when the dog cannot be safely housed.

Of course, these facts won't do one damn thing to convince a "THINK OF THE STRAYS!!!!!" devotee to change his or her mind. That's because they didn't come up with it because of facts, they don't post it on Facebook dicussions because of facts, and they aren't even interested in facts. (Which is painfully clear, since they haven't got any.)

This is nothing, really, but baseless goal-post moving, and a reassuring (to us) sign that we have pretty much proven our contention that there are enough homes, and that communities that adopt the No Kill Equation can adopt, return-to-owner, spay/neuter, TNR, and embrace our fellow humans out of shelter killing.

Which is good news for the animals, even if the No-Kill nay-sayers will never admit it.

02 April 2013

This is the second in a series of posts on the common tactics used in public discussions of animal sheltering reform by opponents of No-Kill. This one today is a perennial favorite of theirs: The distraction.

One of the reasons they like it so much is No-Kill advocates seem to fall for it a lot. So let me break it down for you.

First, there's a post about some elements of saving all healthy and treatable homeless pets in your community's shelters.

Soon, one or two or an avalanche of strangers appear, all with varying levels of politeness or hostility asking a few simple questions about totally unrelated issues: Farm animal conditions, vegetarianism or veganism, abortion, gun control, the Affordable Care Act, poverty, malnutrition in children, the threat of nuclear weapons in Iran or North Korea, and pretty much any other compelling social issue you can even imagine.

The gist of their questions is that you either can't really advocate for shelter pets if you don't also advocate for [fill in their chosen cause], and/or you shouldn't waste your time on shelter pets when there are all these other horrible problems demanding solutions.

It's very easy to let these people distract you from the actual work of shelter reform, and off the topic of saving the lives of homeless pets. That's because many of us are active in other forms of advocacy as well as shelter reform, and also because many people in our movement lead with our hearts, and want to address all forms of suffering and injustice.

Here's the thing, though: If you let yourself get pulled off in ten thousand directions chasing every injustice anyone mentions to you, you'll be completely demoralized and utterly ineffective in, oh, around ten minutes.

You'll also allow your message to become hopelessly muddied, and thus lose one of the biggest things the shelter reform movement has going for it: Near-universal support from average pet owners. That is, in fact, why our opponents are so vicious in their attempts to distract us and get us off message, because our message can't be contradicted otherwise.

Here's a handy test to know if a question should be answered: Is this a problem that has to be solved before we can save all our community's healthy and treatable homeless pets?

If the answer is "no," then it's a distraction, and you need to point that out and move on. Every minute you spend engaging on their terms is a minute you are not spending focusing on saving healthy and treatable pets.

Right now, the three topics that are most frequently used to divide and distract No-Kill advocates are abortion, farm animal treatment, and veganism.

Do many people in the No-Kill movement have opinions on these issues, particularly the last two? You bet. But we do not need to agree on any of those three things to save all the healthy and treatable pets.

We do not need to have many all-night consciousness-raising sessions on those issues to save all the healthy and treatable pets.

We do not need to limit our ranks to only those who hold the same views on those issues to save all the healthy and treatable pets -- in fact, doing so will only hamper our efforts.

In short, we do not need to resolve, mention, or otherwise discuss those issues to save all the healthy and treatable pets.

Therefore, even if they are issues you care about or want to advocate for or want to support or oppose, they are distractions from the work of saving all healthy and treatable pets. Attempts by people in public conversations to divert your attention to those issues is not part of making the picture bigger or widening the circle of our compassion or even changing our ethical priorities; it's about stopping the No-Kill Movement.